A glimpse of what Mozart would have improvised. In the 1980’s I was a pupil of Leo van Doesselaar, and he took everyone with him when he had a concert. In the timeslot in which he could practice, he was so generous to let us play the great organ’s too. That’s how I came to play the Muller organ in Haarlem, Netherlands; the same organ Handel and Mozart had played on too. You can imagine it had a great “wow” factor…

The “normal” practice was in the English church in the Begijnhof in Amsterdam. One day, Leo was late and I started to improvise. For some reason I was getting to “god save the queen”, and really had fun screwing it up with scales and weird ornaments. When I looked in the mirror of the organ I saw a man with a broom standing very straight and serious looking. I thought he made a joke. Leo van Doesselaar came in and the man whispered something in his ear. Leo came to me laughing and said that the sexton had asked very politely, yet VERY urgent NEVER to play that tune again unless it was an official anniversary… Only when I stopped playing I saw that the man rested at ease and swiped the floor again… :)